The New iDevGames

As many of you have done already, please thank Carlos for keeping the site running for over a decade, and for all of the effort and good work he did in creating a great community. I know that Carlos thinks of iDevGames as a child and it wasn't easy coming to the decision to pass the baton. Being trusted to direct iDevGames is an honor and to me comes with a great sense of responsibility.

And to Carlos: I promise I will feed Command-R his bytes reguarly and polish his globe.

The first order of business is to move idevgames.com to its shiny new home. The all-new website isn't ready yet, so until it is, every part of the site except the forums will be offline for a while. As the forums are the most critical part of the site, today I dumped the current iDG forums database and tested getting it running on the new server and it seems to be in working order.

As a general overview of what will happen, the plan is to first restore as much of the previous content as makes sense (including contest entries), and then add new features, hopefully to make it more useful and vibrant for everybody. Rather than having a big reveal, the site will be continually updated when each piece is finished individually.

Even restoring the old content is a lot of work, and until "staff" with proper access is arranged, it'll just be me doing most of it. (And right now, I'm working my tail off trying to get a new app finished for the Mac App Store, and finish two major updates to my other programs.) However, quite a bit has been done already, so there should hopefully some solid progress soon.

If everything goes according to plan and there's a good amount of involvement from the community, a good chunk of the site should be done by spring, and we should be ready to run a successful uDevGames 2011 sometime in the second half of next year.

As you can see, I've made several tweaks to the forums to make them a little nicer on the eyes. I've also enabled a bunch of the front end of the site. I haven't yet gone through all of the old content and made articles for them, or added all of the new content. More to do...

Looking nice now (I kinda thought the old ones were an eyesore). Just one little issue…since the font is so small, I liberally apply some zoom gestures while on my laptop. But then the forum flows outside the visible screen space. Any chance you could look at tweaking the width to flow?

Other than that, I like the new front page for the actual site. Sure, classic layout. But that's not a bad thing! Guess the site is in safe hands.

It's a shame there's no 11.5px size. 12 is slightly too big and 11 is slightly too small. I tweaked the font/size combo. Overall the size is now in between what it was originally and what I changed it too before.

I did a quick glance at a few sites I find easy to read and reddit and gamedev.net both do Verdana 13. Slashdot and Google News do Arial 13. So... 13 seems like what the big dogs prefer. I didn't even really notice the smaller font here until it was mentioned, so I can't complain too much.

[edit] Actually, the helvetica 12 you're currently using appears pretty close in size and style to me as Arial 13.

For some reason, my Safari failed to even display Arial (n/m I just didn't realize they were that close) at all so I couldn't see if it looked better than Helvetica. The original font was Verdana 12 which just seemed too noisy to me. Line-height changes didn't help. It's a pity the web doesn't have an easy way for end-users to change font sizes in certain areas. I really liked Verdana 11, but in retrospect I can see that for you guys on high-res displays than me, it would be too small.

Yeah, Web fonts are just a big ol' pain in the butt in my limited experience. You never know exactly what you're going to get across browsers on one OS, never mind across different OSes! I am not a good web designer at all, so don't listen to me, but one thing I do is look at it on as many browsers and OSes as I can before I finally "settle" for one. I think Helvetica Neue was the only one that looked good across multiple browsers on OS X/Windows/Linux.